Service Tags are rather short, if you brute force guessed existing service tags would it give enough personal info (first/last name) to then do a phone directory look-up to get enough info to know your number, name, service tag, etc...?
Brute force guessing valid tags is trivial: Here's one i made up by changing some digits around from one I had: FCKBRK1
Other than the country in which it was, and when it was shipped, and when the warranty ended, I'm not seeing anything useful for identifying who owns it.
I'm expecting dell itself was breached, or one of its support contractors.
Noncompliance Fines- The consequences of not being PCI compliant range from $5,000 to $500,000, which is levied by banks and credit card institutions. Banks may fine based on forensic research they must perform to remediate noncompliance. Credit card institutions may levy fines as a punishment for noncompliance and propose a timeline of increasing fines. The following table is an example of a time-cost schedule which Visa uses. [...]
My card has been compromised twice in the past two years. The first time the bank caught it, before the transactions even showed up on my online banking, they called me couriered me a knew card.
Second time, I noticed the charges, called them, they made a list of the fraudulent items, reversed them, and I had a new card in 24 hours.
I had to update my saved card information with a few subscription services like netflix. Am I really going to sue someone because I had to do THAT?
use it to buy loads of expensive stuff, narcotics and subscriptions to perverse sex sites
If that ACTUALLY happened, then sure HE had been harmed for some quantifiable amount, but he still has to connect it to the Michaels leak... who knows maybe his card was stolen from somewhere else too.
And its just him, not a class action.
Not unless everyone who had their cards stolen in the michaels breach all were subscribed to perverse sex sites and purchased narcotics and had to deal with all of that. But that didnt happen.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but for example the credit card companies CAN show direct harm, and could potentially sue Michael's for damages (or just fine them through the existing contractual agreements) for any losses they incurred as a result. (And that goes back to my earlier comment about PCI compliance penalties, etc).
The court was right in my opinion. The breach is bad, but showing concrete material damages (outside of copyright infringment suits) is a usual requirement. If the plaintiffs couldn't show they were harmed, Michael's doesn't need to make them whole.
There is still potential for various other types of lawsuits to succeed; PCI compliance, or criminal negligence, etc.
The daughters, for suing over a poem written by their mom? I assume that's correct right?
But the interesting thing is that the basic thrust of your argument is that the daughters should create something new instead of profiting of the mental effort of someone else? Right?
If you expect the daughters to "create something new" then shouldn't Warner Bros also be held to that expectation?
You are literally arguing that the daughters should create something new for themselves to profit from as a rationale for why Warner Bros shouldn't have to "create something new" for themselves.
Both are attempting to profit from the mental effort of a dead person. And warner brothers isn't even a relative.
If your ISP is not doing IPv6, then chances are that your DHCPv6 is assigning ULAs to your computers. Which then begs the question - what sort of addresses are your DNS getting?
Oh, my ISP is not doing ipv6; I was just speculating how it might work if it was. For example, even if it was doing ipv6 I'd still prefer a device under my control handing out addresses to my my other devices, and handling name resolution for them.
And in my case, with openwrt, it *is* doing that.
Anyway, privacy extensions do not involve EUI-64, which is the SLAAC mechanism that uses MAC, and provides a static address
Ok.
But the RFC that was linked... in the abstract.
"This document describes an extension to IPv6 stateless
address autoconfiguration for interfaces whose interface identifier is derived from an IEEE identifier." (And later it clarifies that that the IEEE identifier is "ie a link-layer MAC address".)
"The focus of this document is on addresses derived from IEEE identifiers, as the Extensions to IPv6 Address Autoconfiguration concern being addressed exists only in those cases where the interface identifier is globally unique and non-changing."
So you can understand why I came to the conclusion; that these extensions related to preventing the tying of publicly visible ipv6 addresses to a MAC address.
Even better, why can't we realize the promise of IPv6? I'd like to set up a kerberos server I can authenticate to remotely that then grants access to all internet-of-things goodies in my house. I'd set it up so that the firewall would block traffic to everything except the kerberos server until I authenticate to kerberos and then only for the IPv6 addr that authenticated. I think that would work. Might need to set up some script hooks to add/remove ip6tables rules on the fly.
A normal tech savvy person would just ssh/ or vpn into their home computer and control shit on the LAN from there. A normal not as savvy person would use something like teamviewer or gotmypc to their home computer.
I'm not sure why ANYBODY would fart around with on the fly scripting iptables re-configuration for something like this?! If you simply must get too clever set up port knocking for your vpn server listening port and call it a day.:p
I'd like to know what my servers public ip address is at all times. And I'd like for everything to talk to everything else on my network seamlessly.
I want DNS to work. And I don't really want my LAN hosts to be registering their hostnames for DNS on the public internet with my ISP. So this means running my own DNS and DHCP servers right? In fact I'm running OpenWRT which is doing DHCPv6; (but I have no idea where its getting its address pool from -- my ISP isn't doing ipv6 yet so not from them) But in any case I can assume I'm not using stateless autoconfiguration addresses anymore. So these privacy extensions are irrelevant?
Indeed skimming the RFC, these extensions have nothing at all to do with what the previous poster was even asking about. All this is talking about is the issue that ipv6 addresses often include the MAC, and some people might not want their device MAC visible on the internet for $reasons$. The previous poster wasn't talking about MAC he was talking about having even their internal ip address invisible.
They'd have figured out that prey on whales is profitable regardless; and the whaling should be illegal.
As to why we won't spend a $1 on a game? That's complicated; a combination of payment-friction, too much choice, buyers remorse, title discovery, social integration, etc, etc.
But you'll need to remove the freemium shit from the store first before anything get's better.
Right now though, we are letting the whales subsidize us; even though the games we're getting as a result are pretty shit due to the whale-bait they're loaded with.
We're a society that balks at paying a monthly subscription fee to pay for game servers, yet will happily spend far more money on fake items. Think of how many times you've heard of a game "going free to play" and had their profits skyrocket because of it?
No. We're not. That's just it. Most of us spend almost nothing on that crap. A small handful of us lack enough common sense and discipline to stop themselves from being ripped off. And they get ripped off so royally though that its net profitable.
As a society, the rest of us just laugh at their stupidity; even when they are living paycheque to paycheque or worse.
But they're being exploited. Its practically human hacking, no different than the slot machines that some people can't resist and can't walk away from, or other such 'systems' (e.g. heroin) . And as a society we should be saying its wrong; and take steps to protect people from that sort of exploitation.
But instead we embrace the idea of 'personal responsibility' and blame the victim for their bad decisions. But when you see someone spending thousands of dollars per month to... "advance" in a game like this, you really have to question the underlying assumption that the victim is really in proper control there.
I currently view BBC and Al Jazeera for world news. Not that I think either is perfect, but relative to the rest that I've found these two are pretty good.
Why the one the local community leaders set up to "protect our children", of course!
Not my local community. Or perhaps even if it was some local community leaders the actual libraries aren't paying it any attention.
So context please. Is this some national banned books list, statewide? Some podunk community public library? Banned by some school district? Or just one K-6 school?
Exactly the same constraint applies to Facebook or a mobile carrier paying for internet access - it has costs, and it doesn't make sense for FB to pay for everyone to stream porn videos from Xvideos.com.
See... this is a fallacy. The issue here isn't that facebook isn't paying to stream videos... porn or otherwise. If they had a 'no video' policy, nobody would blink.
If they don't want to subsidize streaming porn videos that's fine; but its a strawman -- that's not even the issue.
The issue is that it blocks access to:
mathoverflow.net, linux.org, project gutenberg, ietf.org, slashdot.org, cancerforums.net, woodworkingtalk.com, and literally a million other sources of news, information, ideas, support, and so forth that is all primarily text.
"He says, "We have collections of free basic books. They're called libraries. They don't contain every book, but they still provide a world of good.
The library isn't restricted in what books it carries. Not having all of them is primarily a physical space and economic limitation -- if they could carry all of them they would.
And the books they choose to carry is determined by criteria that is not simply a short list made by their corporate sponsors.
In contrast the restrictions with his internet access are entirely arbitrary and self serving. There is no valid comparison to be made.
They had "faith"... and that faith made it not science because when the evidence came back that the hypothesis was bunk... they just doubled down.
What evidence? Failure to succeed is not evidence that the hypothesis is bunk; especially if there is room in the hypothesis for additional refinement.
Science does this all the time. Consider the 'planet vulcan', which many (if not most) scientists believed existed, and searched for. And the repeated failures to find it were attributed to calculation errors, inadequate instruments, etc... but they kept trying. Building better instruments, refining the calculations... until General Relativeity explained the phenomena they were seeing with Mecury's orbit, without needing the gravity of a hypothetical Vulcan.
Was the search for vulcan science? Were the scientists looking for equivalent to a cargo cult? I'd have to say yes to the first, and no to the 2nd. No question.
Today we have 'dark matter'. Which might turn out to be another vulcan and we'll discover new physics to explain what is going on; or maybe we'll actually "find" dark matter. Either way... we keep looking for it, and keep not finding it... and its still science. But all we have are observations that suggest it "must" be there.
Cargo cults... they knew the planes existed. They'd seen them. They'd seen them fly by, circle, and land -- they just had a much to rudimentary understanding of why to replicate it. But nevertheless their attempt was a science... they were trying to recreate the conditions under which they had observed a phenomena to reproduce that phenomena. That's science. Not working doesn't make it not science.
The observed a correlation between airports and cargo planes arriving.
The formed a hypothesis that constructing something that looks like an airport and control tower would bring the cargo airplanes.
They tested the hypothesis, by building the airport etc. It didn't work.
They (correctly) knew that something made the cargo planes come; so they tried to improve their emulation of the airport operations etc.
Sure if was fundamentally wrong. But it WAS the scientific method in action. Observation, hypothesis, experiment...repeat.
Its no different than heliocentric astronomy. We kept trying more complicated and elaborate constructions to predict the planetary motions, but it just kept failing because it was wrong.
I think the point is a bit weak. If he were to try to make this argument in a courtroom to argue that the RIAA's standard for lost sales is unreasonable,
Ah; but how often does the RIAA actually attempt to establish lost sales, aka ACTUAL DAMAGES?
From what I've seen they tend to collect on Statutory damages.
he's akin to a factory churning out knockoff purses and throwing them in a furnace - nobody would say, the attorneys would argue, that those knockoff purses that are immediately destroyed are lost sales.
True. But it IS enough to trigger statutory damages; which do not require any actual damages to be established, nor indeed to even hypothetically exist.
but this stunt has no bearing on the wrongness of their argument because it doesn't affect anything that they're actually arguing about - other humans who want a song acquiring it without paying for it.
I think this exercise, if nothing else highlights the absurdity of 'statutory damages'. Not to mention that any media coverage it gets brings attention to the larger real issues with current copyright law.
And I think if the RIAA were required to demonstrate the actual harm an individual sharer tends to cause the whole thing would fall apart. e.g. if my upload ratio is 20 on an a song, i've effectively supplied 20 copies of that song. That puts the actual maximum harm at $20 for that song if we assume everybody that downloaded it would have paid retail for it if it wasn't available.
And even that's ridiculous on its face. 8 of them wouldn't have bothered to get the song at all. 5 more didn't care about the quality and would have ripped it from youtube or spotify or the end credits of the movie it was used in, or the radio, or made a copy of a friends CD, or something. 3 of them are children who don't have the dollar, 3 more are from countries where the song isn't readily available or a 1$ is their daily food budget.. leaving one guy who wanted a high quality track, and would have paid for it if he hadn't been able to just download it. Actual damages to music industry: $1
Legally, we are at level 2. Technologically, we are at level 3.
I'd say that's correct.
But 2 years to get to level 4? No. 2 years we'll be able to expand the list of "specific traffic and environment" situations that are supported, but that's still miles away from level 4.
For level 4, the car has to be able to cope with the car in front of it having a blowout on a bridge, and skidding to a stop on its side. And I'm not talking about just safely braking to avoid a collision; that's the EASY part.
I'm talking about coping with the fact that now there is a traffic jam piling up behind it, and a 2 tons out of commission vehicle blocking the lanes in front of it.
So it needs to get out of the way for the ambulance if necessary. It needs to follow directions to detour around the wreckage, perhaps backup, off the bridge cross over to the oncoming lanes using one of the emergency/service vehicle openings, and then take turns with oncoming traffic to pass the accident as directed by the police.
You think we're two years from a car that can do that? Not me. I don't think we're even close.
And if we don't have that? Then what? We're going to have empty cars, and cars occupied by people who aren't able to drive causing truly epic traffic jams because they simply don't know how to cope with exceptional circumstances like this.
I guess I don't recall anyone ever talk about money in any of the movies.
Did you watch the movies?
What 10 minutes in Owen buys the droids from the Jawas.
Luke's request to join the academy was denied because they couldn't afford it. "Maybe after the harvest I'll have enough money to hire some help, and you can go to the academy next year."
Further on...
Han solo demanded 10,000 to fly Luke to Alderaan.
Han: 10000, all in advance Luke: 10000, we could almost buy our own ship for that! Han: Yeah, but whose going to fly it kid, you?...
Ben: We can pay you 2,000 now, and 15,000 when we we reach Alderaan.
They raised part of the advance money selling Luke's speeder.
Ben: You'll have to sell your speeder. Luke: That's ok, I'm never coming back here again.
Then there was the encounter with Greedo where Han says he's got the money and he'll pay Jabba back.
Then there's the scene where Luke motivates Han to join him rescuing the princess because she's rich, and the reward would be Luke "more wealth than you can imagine" Han: "I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit..."
--- And in the prequels -- first sentence of the opening crawl text of a phantom menace
"Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute."
"taxation of trade routes"
Later on, the whole reason they ended up pod-racing was because imperial credits weren't acceptable to Watto to buy the engine parts they needed to repair their ship; and they didn't have any local currency. Anakin suggests they can win the prize money pod racing... they later dodge that a bit by simply wagering Watto for it.
Gas may pumps may be slightly calibrated in favor or customer - that I couldn't say; but every pump I see claims to be pumping gas volume corrected to a standardized temperature.
So as gas contracts when its cold, you get slightly less than a gallon for the price of a gallon. (Warm it up to the standardized temperature though, and you'll have all the gas you paid for.)
Service Tags are rather short, if you brute force guessed existing service tags would it give enough personal info (first/last name) to then do a phone directory look-up to get enough info to know your number, name, service tag, etc...?
Brute force guessing valid tags is trivial: Here's one i made up by changing some digits around from one I had: FCKBRK1
Other than the country in which it was, and when it was shipped, and when the warranty ended, I'm not seeing anything useful for identifying who owns it.
I'm expecting dell itself was breached, or one of its support contractors.
So what is this then, exactly?
Noncompliance Fines- The consequences of not being PCI compliant range from $5,000 to $500,000, which is levied by banks and credit card institutions. Banks may fine based on forensic research they must perform to remediate noncompliance. Credit card institutions may levy fines as a punishment for noncompliance and propose a timeline of increasing fines. The following table is an example of a time-cost schedule which Visa uses. [...]
http://www.focusonpci.com/site...
My card has been compromised twice in the past two years. The first time the bank caught it, before the transactions even showed up on my online banking, they called me couriered me a knew card.
Second time, I noticed the charges, called them, they made a list of the fraudulent items, reversed them, and I had a new card in 24 hours.
I had to update my saved card information with a few subscription services like netflix. Am I really going to sue someone because I had to do THAT?
use it to buy loads of expensive stuff, narcotics and subscriptions to perverse sex sites
If that ACTUALLY happened, then sure HE had been harmed for some quantifiable amount, but he still has to connect it to the Michaels leak... who knows maybe his card was stolen from somewhere else too.
And its just him, not a class action.
Not unless everyone who had their cards stolen in the michaels breach all were subscribed to perverse sex sites and purchased narcotics and had to deal with all of that. But that didnt happen.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but for example the credit card companies CAN show direct harm, and could potentially sue Michael's for damages (or just fine them through the existing contractual agreements) for any losses they incurred as a result. (And that goes back to my earlier comment about PCI compliance penalties, etc).
The court was right in my opinion. The breach is bad, but showing concrete material damages (outside of copyright infringment suits) is a usual requirement. If the plaintiffs couldn't show they were harmed, Michael's doesn't need to make them whole.
There is still potential for various other types of lawsuits to succeed; PCI compliance, or criminal negligence, etc.
Wait, so who are we criticising here?
The daughters, for suing over a poem written by their mom? I assume that's correct right?
But the interesting thing is that the basic thrust of your argument is that the daughters should create something new instead of profiting of the mental effort of someone else? Right?
If you expect the daughters to "create something new" then shouldn't Warner Bros also be held to that expectation?
You are literally arguing that the daughters should create something new for themselves to profit from as a rationale for why Warner Bros shouldn't have to "create something new" for themselves.
Both are attempting to profit from the mental effort of a dead person. And warner brothers isn't even a relative.
If your ISP is not doing IPv6, then chances are that your DHCPv6 is assigning ULAs to your computers. Which then begs the question - what sort of addresses are your DNS getting?
Oh, my ISP is not doing ipv6; I was just speculating how it might work if it was. For example, even if it was doing ipv6 I'd still prefer a device under my control handing out addresses to my my other devices, and handling name resolution for them.
And in my case, with openwrt, it *is* doing that.
Anyway, privacy extensions do not involve EUI-64, which is the SLAAC mechanism that uses MAC, and provides a static address
Ok.
But the RFC that was linked... in the abstract.
"This document describes an extension to IPv6 stateless
address autoconfiguration for interfaces whose interface identifier is derived from an IEEE identifier." (And later it clarifies that that the IEEE identifier is "ie a link-layer MAC address".)
"The focus of this document is on addresses derived from IEEE identifiers, as the Extensions to IPv6 Address Autoconfiguration concern being addressed exists only in those cases where the interface identifier is globally unique and non-changing."
So you can understand why I came to the conclusion; that these extensions related to preventing the tying of publicly visible ipv6 addresses to a MAC address.
I said as a society. Not me personally. Hell read 4/5ths of the comments here on slashdot which all say "He had it coming."
Even better, why can't we realize the promise of IPv6? I'd like to set up a kerberos server I can authenticate to remotely that then grants access to all internet-of-things goodies in my house. I'd set it up so that the firewall would block traffic to everything except the kerberos server until I authenticate to kerberos and then only for the IPv6 addr that authenticated. I think that would work. Might need to set up some script hooks to add/remove ip6tables rules on the fly.
A normal tech savvy person would just ssh/ or vpn into their home computer and control shit on the LAN from there. A normal not as savvy person would use something like teamviewer or gotmypc to their home computer.
I'm not sure why ANYBODY would fart around with on the fly scripting iptables re-configuration for something like this?! If you simply must get too clever set up port knocking for your vpn server listening port and call it a day. :p
I don't see how that helps me.
I'd like to know what my servers public ip address is at all times. And I'd like for everything to talk to everything else on my network seamlessly.
I want DNS to work. And I don't really want my LAN hosts to be registering their hostnames for DNS on the public internet with my ISP. So this means running my own DNS and DHCP servers right? In fact I'm running OpenWRT which is doing DHCPv6; (but I have no idea where its getting its address pool from -- my ISP isn't doing ipv6 yet so not from them) But in any case I can assume I'm not using stateless autoconfiguration addresses anymore. So these privacy extensions are irrelevant?
Indeed skimming the RFC, these extensions have nothing at all to do with what the previous poster was even asking about. All this is talking about is the issue that ipv6 addresses often include the MAC, and some people might not want their device MAC visible on the internet for $reasons$. The previous poster wasn't talking about MAC he was talking about having even their internal ip address invisible.
They'd have figured out that prey on whales is profitable regardless; and the whaling should be illegal.
As to why we won't spend a $1 on a game? That's complicated; a combination of payment-friction, too much choice, buyers remorse, title discovery, social integration, etc, etc.
But you'll need to remove the freemium shit from the store first before anything get's better.
Right now though, we are letting the whales subsidize us; even though the games we're getting as a result are pretty shit due to the whale-bait they're loaded with.
We're a society that balks at paying a monthly subscription fee to pay for game servers, yet will happily spend far more money on fake items. Think of how many times you've heard of a game "going free to play" and had their profits skyrocket because of it?
No. We're not. That's just it. Most of us spend almost nothing on that crap. A small handful of us lack enough common sense and discipline to stop themselves from being ripped off. And they get ripped off so royally though that its net profitable.
As a society, the rest of us just laugh at their stupidity; even when they are living paycheque to paycheque or worse.
But they're being exploited. Its practically human hacking, no different than the slot machines that some people can't resist and can't walk away from, or other such 'systems' (e.g. heroin) . And as a society we should be saying its wrong; and take steps to protect people from that sort of exploitation.
But instead we embrace the idea of 'personal responsibility' and blame the victim for their bad decisions. But when you see someone spending thousands of dollars per month to ... "advance" in a game like this, you really have to question the underlying assumption that the victim is really in proper control there.
I currently view BBC and Al Jazeera for world news. Not that I think either is perfect, but relative to the rest that I've found these two are pretty good.
Why the one the local community leaders set up to "protect our children", of course!
Not my local community. Or perhaps even if it was some local community leaders the actual libraries aren't paying it any attention.
So context please. Is this some national banned books list, statewide? Some podunk community public library? Banned by some school district? Or just one K-6 school?
Context please. It "ended up on 'a' banned book list?
WHAT banned book list? And who uses that list?
Exactly the same constraint applies to Facebook or a mobile carrier paying for internet access - it has costs, and it doesn't make sense for FB to pay for everyone to stream porn videos from Xvideos.com.
See... this is a fallacy. The issue here isn't that facebook isn't paying to stream videos... porn or otherwise. If they had a 'no video' policy, nobody would blink.
If they don't want to subsidize streaming porn videos that's fine; but its a strawman -- that's not even the issue.
The issue is that it blocks access to:
mathoverflow.net, linux.org, project gutenberg, ietf.org, slashdot.org, cancerforums.net, woodworkingtalk.com, and literally a million other sources of news, information, ideas, support, and so forth that is all primarily text.
"He says, "We have collections of free basic books. They're called libraries. They don't contain every book, but they still provide a world of good.
The library isn't restricted in what books it carries. Not having all of them is primarily a physical space and economic limitation -- if they could carry all of them they would.
And the books they choose to carry is determined by criteria that is not simply a short list made by their corporate sponsors.
In contrast the restrictions with his internet access are entirely arbitrary and self serving. There is no valid comparison to be made.
-sigh-
yes, perhaps I did. :)
They had "faith"... and that faith made it not science because when the evidence came back that the hypothesis was bunk... they just doubled down.
What evidence? Failure to succeed is not evidence that the hypothesis is bunk; especially if there is room in the hypothesis for additional refinement.
Science does this all the time. Consider the 'planet vulcan', which many (if not most) scientists believed existed, and searched for. And the repeated failures to find it were attributed to calculation errors, inadequate instruments, etc... but they kept trying. Building better instruments, refining the calculations... until General Relativeity explained the phenomena they were seeing with Mecury's orbit, without needing the gravity of a hypothetical Vulcan.
Was the search for vulcan science? Were the scientists looking for equivalent to a cargo cult? I'd have to say yes to the first, and no to the 2nd. No question.
Today we have 'dark matter'. Which might turn out to be another vulcan and we'll discover new physics to explain what is going on; or maybe we'll actually "find" dark matter. Either way... we keep looking for it, and keep not finding it... and its still science. But all we have are observations that suggest it "must" be there.
Cargo cults ... they knew the planes existed. They'd seen them. They'd seen them fly by, circle, and land -- they just had a much to rudimentary understanding of why to replicate it. But nevertheless their attempt was a science... they were trying to recreate the conditions under which they had observed a phenomena to reproduce that phenomena. That's science. Not working doesn't make it not science.
I think cargo cults are pretty science-ish.
The observed a correlation between airports and cargo planes arriving.
The formed a hypothesis that constructing something that looks like an airport and control tower would bring the cargo airplanes.
They tested the hypothesis, by building the airport etc. It didn't work.
They (correctly) knew that something made the cargo planes come; so they tried to improve their emulation of the airport operations etc.
Sure if was fundamentally wrong. But it WAS the scientific method in action. Observation, hypothesis, experiment...repeat.
Its no different than heliocentric astronomy. We kept trying more complicated and elaborate constructions to predict the planetary motions, but it just kept failing because it was wrong.
I think the point is a bit weak. If he were to try to make this argument in a courtroom to argue that the RIAA's standard for lost sales is unreasonable,
Ah; but how often does the RIAA actually attempt to establish lost sales, aka ACTUAL DAMAGES?
From what I've seen they tend to collect on Statutory damages.
he's akin to a factory churning out knockoff purses and throwing them in a furnace - nobody would say, the attorneys would argue, that those knockoff purses that are immediately destroyed are lost sales.
True. But it IS enough to trigger statutory damages; which do not require any actual damages to be established, nor indeed to even hypothetically exist.
but this stunt has no bearing on the wrongness of their argument because it doesn't affect anything that they're actually arguing about - other humans who want a song acquiring it without paying for it.
I think this exercise, if nothing else highlights the absurdity of 'statutory damages'. Not to mention that any media coverage it gets brings attention to the larger real issues with current copyright law.
And I think if the RIAA were required to demonstrate the actual harm an individual sharer tends to cause the whole thing would fall apart. e.g. if my upload ratio is 20 on an a song, i've effectively supplied 20 copies of that song. That puts the actual maximum harm at $20 for that song if we assume everybody that downloaded it would have paid retail for it if it wasn't available.
And even that's ridiculous on its face. 8 of them wouldn't have bothered to get the song at all. 5 more didn't care about the quality and would have ripped it from youtube or spotify or the end credits of the movie it was used in, or the radio, or made a copy of a friends CD, or something. 3 of them are children who don't have the dollar, 3 more are from countries where the song isn't readily available or a 1$ is their daily food budget.. leaving one guy who wanted a high quality track, and would have paid for it if he hadn't been able to just download it. Actual damages to music industry: $1
Legally, we are at level 2. Technologically, we are at level 3.
I'd say that's correct.
But 2 years to get to level 4? No. 2 years we'll be able to expand the list of "specific traffic and environment" situations that are supported, but that's still miles away from level 4.
For level 4, the car has to be able to cope with the car in front of it having a blowout on a bridge, and skidding to a stop on its side. And I'm not talking about just safely braking to avoid a collision; that's the EASY part.
I'm talking about coping with the fact that now there is a traffic jam piling up behind it, and a 2 tons out of commission vehicle blocking the lanes in front of it.
So it needs to get out of the way for the ambulance if necessary. It needs to follow directions to detour around the wreckage, perhaps backup, off the bridge cross over to the oncoming lanes using one of the emergency/service vehicle openings, and then take turns with oncoming traffic to pass the accident as directed by the police.
You think we're two years from a car that can do that? Not me. I don't think we're even close.
And if we don't have that? Then what? We're going to have empty cars, and cars occupied by people who aren't able to drive causing truly epic traffic jams because they simply don't know how to cope with exceptional circumstances like this.
I guess I don't recall anyone ever talk about money in any of the movies.
Did you watch the movies?
What 10 minutes in Owen buys the droids from the Jawas.
Luke's request to join the academy was denied because they couldn't afford it. "Maybe after the harvest I'll have enough money to hire some help, and you can go to the academy next year."
Further on...
Han solo demanded 10,000 to fly Luke to Alderaan.
Han: 10000, all in advance ...
Luke: 10000, we could almost buy our own ship for that!
Han: Yeah, but whose going to fly it kid, you?
Ben: We can pay you 2,000 now, and 15,000 when we we reach Alderaan.
They raised part of the advance money selling Luke's speeder.
Ben: You'll have to sell your speeder.
Luke: That's ok, I'm never coming back here again.
Then there was the encounter with Greedo where Han says he's got the money and he'll pay Jabba back.
Then there's the scene where Luke motivates Han to join him rescuing the princess because she's rich, and the reward would be Luke "more wealth than you can imagine" Han: "I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit..."
---
And in the prequels -- first sentence of the opening crawl text of a phantom menace
"Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute."
"taxation of trade routes"
Later on, the whole reason they ended up pod-racing was because imperial credits weren't acceptable to Watto to buy the engine parts they needed to repair their ship; and they didn't have any local currency. Anakin suggests they can win the prize money pod racing... they later dodge that a bit by simply wagering Watto for it.
Gas may pumps may be slightly calibrated in favor or customer - that I couldn't say; but every pump I see claims to be pumping gas volume corrected to a standardized temperature.
So as gas contracts when its cold, you get slightly less than a gallon for the price of a gallon. (Warm it up to the standardized temperature though, and you'll have all the gas you paid for.)
Are these tape backups from the late '90s?
Nope. They live on spinning rust. Seriously... the entire thing is well under a terabyte. Its not exactly hard to keep it around.